Bannon in Limbo as Trump Faces Growing Calls for the Strategist’s Ouster

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Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump's outgoing chief strategist, has been criticized as being emblematic of the far-right nationalism that turned violent in Virginia last weekend.Published OnAug. 14, 2017CreditImage by Al Drago/The New York Times

Rupert Murdoch has repeatedly urged President Trump to fire him. Anthony Scaramucci, the president’s former communications director, thrashed him on television as a white nationalist. Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, the national security adviser, refused to even say he could work with him.

For months, Mr. Trump has considered ousting Stephen K. Bannon, the White House chief strategist and relentless nationalist who ran the Breitbart website and called it a “platform for the alt-right.” Mr. Trump has sent Mr. Bannon to a kind of internal exile, and has not met face-to-face for more than a week with a man who was once a fixture in the Oval Office, according to aides and friends of the president.

So far, Mr. Trump has not been able to follow through — a product of his dislike of confrontation, the bonds of a foxhole friendship forged during the 2016 presidential campaign and concerns about what mischief Mr. Bannon might do once he leaves the protective custody of the West Wing.

Not least, Mr. Bannon embodies the defiant populism at the core of the president’s agenda. Despite being marginalized, Mr. Bannon consulted with the president repeatedly over the weekend as Mr. Trump struggled to respond to the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Va. In general, Mr. Bannon has cautioned the president not to criticize far-right activists too severely for fear of antagonizing a small but energetic part of his base.

But what once endeared him to the president has now become a major liability. After the president waited two days to blame white supremacists for the violence in Charlottesville, there is new pressure from Mr. Trump’s critics to dismiss Mr. Bannon.

“I don’t think that White House has a chance of functioning properly as long as there’s a resident lunatic fringe,” said Mark Salter, a longtime adviser to Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona. At best, he said, Mr. Bannon seems willing to “tolerate something that’s intolerable” in Mr. Trump’s base.

Mr. Bannon also has admirers, including Representative Mark Meadows, the North Carolina Republican and the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, who said that without Mr. Bannon, “there is a concern among conservatives that Washington, D.C., will influence the president in a way that moves him away from those voters that put him in the White House.”

And Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa and an immigration hard-liner, said that shoving out Mr. Bannon would leave conservatives “crushed.”

Mr. Bannon, who adamantly rejects claims that he is a racist or a sympathizer of white supremacists, is in trouble with John F. Kelly, a retired Marine general and the new White House chief of staff. Mr. Kelly has told Mr. Trump’s top staff that he will not tolerate Mr. Bannon’s shadowland machinations, according to a dozen current and former Trump aides and associates with knowledge of the situation.

Mr. Bannon’s purported crimes: Leaking nasty stories about General McMaster and other colleagues he deems insufficiently populist; feuding bitterly with Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner; and creating his own cadre within the West Wing that operates outside the chain of command.

One of his main sins in the eyes of the president is appearing to revel in the perception that he is the mastermind behind the rise of a pliable Mr. Trump. The president was deeply annoyed at a Time magazine cover article that described Mr. Bannon as the real power and brains behind the Trump throne. Mr. Trump was equally put off by a recent book, “Devil’s Bargain,” by the Bloomberg Businessweek writer Joshua Green, which lavished credit for Mr. Trump’s election on Mr. Bannon.

Others say Mr. Bannon’s continued presence in the White House is not serving the president’s interests.

“He’s got to move more into the mainstream, he’s got to be more into where the moderates are and the independents are,” Mr. Scaramucci, referring to the president, said in an interview on Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” “And so if he does that, he’ll have a very successful legislative agenda that he’ll be able to execute. And if he doesn’t do that, you’re going to see inertia and you’re going to see this resistance from more of the establishment senators that he needs to curry favor with.” Mr. Scaramucci is on friendly terms with Mr. Kushner.

Others say the problem is not Mr. Bannon’s closeness to the far right, it is that he has not done enough for them.

“I do think he’s in trouble, but it’s trouble of his own making,” said Roger J. Stone Jr., Mr. Trump’s sometime adviser, who has publicly criticized Mr. Bannon as ineffective. “I don’t know why conservatives would be upset about him being fired. He has not delivered for them.”

Top administration officials like to joke that working for Mr. Trump is like toiling in the court of Henry VIII. Mick Mulvaney, the president’s budget director, recently handed out copies of the play “A Man for All Seasons,” about the last years of Sir Thomas More, Henry’s chancellor, who was executed for failing to endorse Henry’s split with Rome. Mr. Bannon read it, according to a person familiar with the situation, and was amused when an associate compared him to More.

From the start, Mr. Bannon, 63, has told people in his orbit that he never expected to last in his current position longer than eight months to a year, and hoped to ram through as much of his agenda as he could while he stood in the president’s favor. More recently he has told friends that he is working in the White House one day at a time, and constantly asks himself whether he could better pursue his to-do list — including cracking down on legal and illegal immigration — on the outside.

But the choice might not be his. At a recent dinner at the White House with Mr. Kushner and Mr. Kelly, before Mr. Trump decamped for a working vacation at his private golf club in Bedminster, N.J., the president listened while one of the guests, Mr. Murdoch, a founder of Fox News, said Mr. Bannon had to go.

Mr. Trump offered little pushback, according to a person familiar with the conversation, and vented his frustrations about Mr. Bannon. Mr. Murdoch is close to Mr. Kushner, who has been in open warfare with Mr. Bannon since the spring.

But Mr. Trump has expressed similar sentiments in the past, then backed off. Just a week earlier, as Mr. Trump ruminated on whether to dismiss his chief of staff at the time, Reince Priebus, he was pushed by Mr. Kushner and others to dismiss Mr. Bannon as well. Mr. Trump signaled to allies that he was pretty much there.

Someone — people close to the situation are still unsure whether it was initiated by Mr. Bannon or his cadre of administration allies — mustered a counteroffensive. Mr. Meadows reached out to the president and told him that he would lose his base without Mr. Bannon.

Mr. Bannon’s ability to hang on as Mr. Trump’s in-house populist is in part because of his connections to a handful of ultrarich political patrons, including Sheldon G. Adelson, the pro-Israel casino magnate who is based in Las Vegas.

He is especially close to the reclusive conservative billionaire Robert Mercer and his daughter, Rebekah, who is a frequent sounding board for Mr. Bannon. In April, Mr. Mercer received assurances from Mr. Trump that he was not about to fire Mr. Bannon over his war with Mr. Kushner and moderates like Gary D. Cohn, the chairman of the National Economic Council and a top Trump adviser.

But Mr. Trump still publicly flayed Mr. Bannon, insulting him as a guy “who works for me.” It was a far cry from the lofty status Mr. Bannon enjoyed when he joined Mr. Trump’s faltering campaign in August 2016, when as a rich former investment banker he held the status of a near-peer and hell-raiser who shared his candidate’s daredevil approach to politics.

Mr. Bannon has not fared well in West Wing politics. His bonds with the president seem to be fraying daily, and Mr. Bannon has told friends his status as “staff” — compared with Mr. Kushner’s familial relationship with the president — will ultimately dictate his departure. But he has been adamant in maintaining that his loyalty to Mr. Trump will survive, and has suggested that he might direct his energies at creating a movement to challenge mainstream Republicans too timid to pursue the president’s agenda, like Speaker Paul D. Ryan.

Mr. Bannon’s cause is being damaged, people close to the president say, by a war he is waging against General McMaster. It has taken on a life of its own, with several alt-right websites faithful to Mr. Bannon tearing into the national security adviser.

A person close to Mr. Bannon said that Mr. Bannon has denied that he had anything to do with the campaign against General McMaster, and said he has tried unsuccessfully to stem the tide of negative news coverage about the national security adviser, whom he believes to be prodding the president toward possible war with North Korea and Venezuela. But other White House aides have noted that Mr. Bannon has not publicly rebuked the websites over the stories.

At the least, he is also no longer Mr. Trump’s indispensable man. Mr. Bannon’s protégé, chief speechwriter and policy director, Stephen Miller, shares his populist agenda — centered on a controversial immigration crackdown — and has become one of the president’s favorite aides. Despite his image in the news media as a confrontational ideologue, Mr. Miller has proved to be a deft operator who has ingratiated himself to Mr. Kushner.

Still, Mr. Bannon is a survivor. He has been left for dead before. Mr. Trump is mercurial, and can easily change his mind.

This spring, as Mr. Kushner pressured Mr. Trump to fire Mr. Bannon, the president shot back at his son-in-law. He was not going to get rid of him, he said, just because Mr. Kushner wanted him to go.

Correction:

An earlier version of this article misstated the publication for which Joshua Green works. It is Bloomberg Businessweek, not The Atlantic.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Bannon in Limbo as President Is Urged to Oust Lightning Rod. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe